9 ms·

For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want hal

by mfDjB 4y ago

For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results. At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work for me (typing out form letters, code language conversions). For what it's worth I wouldn't use ChatGPT for search like I do with Google, but what it has done is taken away time I would be Googling for things like "how to write X form letter". I expect as it matures, it will take more time away from me Googling. All these takes underestimate the following: 1) How quickly ChatGPT and its ilk will advance to solve relatively low hanging fruit like "ChatGPT is wrong about this one thing". The delta is extremely important here. 2) How slowly the Google bureaucracy will grind when releasing anything remotely like ChatGPT. All the committees and the burdensome processes in place in Google will keep this new technology locked up for years, and ensure that the final result is a camel (horse designed by committee). It doesn't matter if they have superior technology if they never use it or release it. 3) How much Search means to Google will mean they will treat any product changes to it extremely carefully while Microsoft will be willing to experiment with Bing like they have with Co-Pilot and GitHub. Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future.

elboru 4y ago
Same feeling, the other day I spent just too much time trying to find a chart comparing Messi against Ronaldinho. I mean two of the greatest players ever, how is it possible that I couldn’t find a good page, tons of SEO garbage pages.
- graeme 4y ago
  Is this a good chart? First result for “Messi vs. Ronaldinho stats” https://fbref.com/en/stathead/player_comparison.cgi?show_form=1&request=1&sum=0&comp_type=by_type&dom_lg=1&player_id1=34edcab0&player_id2=d70ce98e&player_id3=dea698d9&player_id4=e342ad68&player_id5=42fd9c7f&player_id6=69384e5d https://fbref.com/en/stathead/player_comparison.cgi?show_for... Searching without stats had a lot of other stuff, but this was near top. And searching without stats shows broader potential interests.
  - elboru 4y ago
    I did check that table, the data is great, but the readability not so much (especially on mobile) the meaning of some column names was not clear (tooltip didn't work on mobile). That's why I was looking for a chart (in the graphical sense), it amazed me that I didn't find one.
    - graeme 4y ago
      Hmm. Is it possible no one has made a good one? I searched for an infographic, came up dry. Usually have no trouble in domains I know well where
ravenstine 4y ago
I know this thread is about ChatGPT, but if you're still using Google then I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine, but I've been using it for quite a while now and really enjoy it. With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them. There's also this think called "lenses" which are basically filters for specific kinds of searches. For instance, I have a "Programming" lens and a "Academic Research" lens. > Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future. What's kind of ironic about this is I think search engines may have mistakenly moved away from strong ML in the sense that you're thinking of. Yes, ML is being used for recommendations much more than ever, but in terms of heuristically finding pages with the keywords you entered, mainstream search engines have become significantly worse at it. I remember a time when The Google would find any pages with the keywords you entered. In recent years (before I stopped using it), I noticed an increasing number of times where I knew it had a page indexed but it would refuse to include it in the results for whatever reason. Either its ability to fuzzy search pages seemed diminished or it would just not match something word-for-word. I could sometimes figure this out when the page I was looking for previously accidentally came up in the results for another barely-related search, so I knew it wasn't that the search engine was culling old pages. Though I'm sure they're doing that as well where they think they can get away with it. Recommendations and curation are largely overrated, and that's where a lot of ML has been mistakenly applied. Well, I say mistakenly in the sense that it benefits the individual and society. Recommendation engines do serve the purpose of the company selling those recommendations. A true application of machine learning to answer engines is the future and will be a big problem for companies that fought the advertising wars by banking on recommendation engines. That is unless they turn their ship soon enough.
- david_allison 4y ago
  Kagi's 'sourced' LLM is available for free currently: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai
  - duckmysick 4y ago
    This is fun. I tried this prompt: "Should I become a paying customer of Kagi?" I like how it links references to support the arguments. It even gives cons and one of the sources is a HN thread from 2016! [1] It's not there yet though, because that one was about the now defunct online store platform and payment processor. On the other hand, maybe it's my fault. I didn't specify that I meant Kagi the search engine. But it's promising. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972
mrtksn 4y ago
> Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future. Arguably, it's the ML that made Google useless for some people. Since some time, Google seems to be curating it's results to address searches in a question format. In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages but today Google seems to be trying to be an answer machine. Unfortunately it's not very good at it and it is just as inaccurate as ChatGPT.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages I mean that died decades ago when spammers just made pages with your word repeated over and over again. Spam makes everything worse.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    Completely agree. I wish Google was able to fix spam instead of trying to be something else than a search engine. The cynic in me thinks that Google is doing it because it’s more profitable. If the results are crap, maybe ads are a better content? it’s not like you are going to use Bing?
    - charlieyu1 4y ago
      I don't even understand why Google doesn't allow blocking some sites in search results. Paid ads, I understand, these generate profits. Although Facebook still allow me to remove some ads that I don't want to see. But unpaid SEO rubbish, how does it benefit Google at all? If anything these parasites bogs down the quality of search results
      - _0w8t 4y ago
        It is hard to filter out SEO rubbish with a low rate of false positives. Spammers became really good at pretending to be real sites. For mail spam various trust-based solutions like server black lists, domain verification etc. were important to solve the problem. But Google has little incentives to push for a trust-based search due to their business model.
Duplo 4y ago
> "inurl:reddit.com" site:reddit.com would be slightly better :)
- afarviral 4y ago
  I was wondering about that. Maybe they know something we don't using inurl. To catch subdomaims maybe?
retinaros 4y ago
google is an advertisement company not a search one. and chagpt as soon as they start to be in the business of search engines will be one too. that is the fate of any tool that is free to use
- xp84 4y ago
  The notion that every information service should be free with ads is one of the main poisons that have made the cesspool that is the net today. Imagine how different the incentives would be if Facebook and Google just made money by making their endusers happy enough to keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee. Their customers would be the end users, instead of being the advertisers.
  - Denzel 4y ago
    Reality doesn’t lend support toward your arguments. I assume you’re from a first-world country, based upon your comment. - Google’s 2022 revenue was $250B. (We’ll assume that’s all ads.) - 8B people in the world; we’ll assume only 4B people have internet access to the web. How much would Google have to charge to break even? $250B/yr / 4B people = $62.5/yr/person = $5/month/person What does the world income distribution look like? [1] 60% of the world population survives on < $10/day ($300/month) for their household (multiple people). We expect more than half the world’s population to pay more than 2% of their income for a single service? To put that in a first-world perspective, that’s $100/month for someone earning $60k; $200/month for someone earning $120k; etc. Does the average American spend that amount of money per month on a single web service? Well of course, you may say, let’s charge more for those who earn more so we can ease the pain on those who earn less! That sounds great in theory, but once again, how many people do you know dropping $200/month on a web service even if they can afford it? Back to two of your points: 1. “Imagine how different the incentives would be” - Yes, imagine, only the wealthy would have access to state-of-the-art search for the web and other services, further increasing the disparity between the two groups. Consider, maybe, that ads represent one of the greatest wealth transfers in our history. One perspective to consider is that the rich (advertisers) are subsidizing the poor (information access) via ads. That sounds like a net positive to me? 2. “Keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee” — YouTube premium exists. What do you think the uptake is on that? YouTube has provided immeasurable benefit to people across the world in the form of knowledge, resources, training, etc. Yet people would sooner reach for an ad-blocker than pay the “small monthly fee” even in nations as rich as the U.S. What causes you to believe that people will pay even more than that for Google’s other services? Disclosure: I work for Google. The opinions and data represented in this post are my own, and not representative of my employer. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/21/are-you-in-the-global-middle-class-find-out-with-our-income-calculator/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/21/are-you-in-...
radium3d 4y ago
I agree, Google has gotten worse, I find more and more often lately I do not find what I am searching for. I try to change my question/wording and it just gets worse. I think their algorithm is failing. Did they lose their way? It used to supply useful information. I think they may need to reduce their reliance on website performance. Site performance does not equate good information. They are excluding the best information just because the site loads slightly slower. Sure, it's nice having a site load fast but that's not what I'm searching for. I want the best result slow or not. As a web developer I have had to spend a great deal of time optimizing sites and clients feel it's extremely important for SEO to have the fastest Google Page Speed score possible.
- xp84 4y ago
  They probably didn't lose their way, so much as they slowly became less effective at combatting the exploits of black-hat SEO and the massive amount of complete garbage content farms out there, while simultaneously they have allowed the ad business to corrupt them completely, which deincentivizes them from showing good organic results because they sell more ads when it's hard to find the obvious things people want. Your hypothesis on performance is interesting! I think someone altruistic thought "if we judge sites on this metric, everyone will be forced to do better" but they failed to realize that it's a hard problem at scale to NOT be a bloated mess (especially on the frontend! 'Let's add one more UI library, it's just 12MB!')
- SteveGerencser 4y ago
  The whole site speed thing is purely a cost reduction on Google's part IMO. By convincing site owners that being fast is a ranking factor they can save millions in bandwidth costs as more and more people lighten their page load. I have watched many web developers absolutely lost their mind trying to squeeze fractions of a second from their load time when there are far better ways to be using their time.
Gigachad 4y ago
I’ve been going to ChatGPT first for most questions these days and then using google to verify. It’s easier to verify than find an answer from scratch. And often ChatGPT will rephrase my words to use the standard terminology for the topic which makes searching even easier. To complete the cycle, ChatGPT just needs to be hooked up to verified sources on topics so it can show me exactly where what it says is proven true.
- pearl20 4y ago
  Agreed. When searching at Google I can alteast decide which website I am going to trust as I can directly see the website URL and information there but with ChatGPT we don't have that advantage yet.
s3p 4y ago
What do you mean by "the delta"? I understand what the greek symbol represents in certain contexts but can we just use plain english to explain what we mean?
2342346666 4y ago
> if anything its getting worse. It's gotten a lot worst and it will probably get replaced by GPT4 or its successor.
Jakawao 4y ago
Freakonomics recently did an episode on their podcast trying to answer this very question: -Is Google Getting Worse? https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ To their credit, Google actually participated in the episode.
binkHN 4y ago
> For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam... Agreed, it's horrible and annoying. How are others doing improved searches?
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539
naturedivine 4y ago
An interesting point is then that we don't need specifically Google search engine. Any search engine will do.
mizzao 4y ago
your first point (about both the crappiness of search, and Reddit) reminds me of this earlier post: https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Google is completely useless for any long tail query. All the results are so heavily optimized for broad, generic queries that you have no choice but to append Reddit.com or Stackoverflow.com to get specific, targeted answers.
tmaly 4y ago
I am finding for code searching Google does well, but I use ddg for everything else.
voytec 4y ago
> most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" "site:reddit.com" should only include hostnames ending with "reddit.com", not URLs including "reddit.com" anywhere. Not sure if this still works though - haven't used Google Search for a few years now and I'm reading (even outside HN[1]) that it's getting worse. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20230107072330/https://www.ft.com/content/228af985-7bf2-4efd-ad73-ae11d1623a58 http://web.archive.org/web/20230107072330/https://www.ft.com...
- splittingTimes 4y ago
  What do you use instead of Google?
  - voytec 4y ago
    A search engine I'm decreasingly fond of, so won't advertise. I've tested alternatives mentioned in this thread and have no clear winner to point at.
PaulHoule 4y ago
When it comes to "ChatGPT is wrong about this one thing", a miss is as good as a mile. The book Gödel, Escher, Bach has a set of dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise over a record player that is an allegory for Gödel's theorem and other limits of computation. Hofstadter points out that it doesn't matter if you are doing computing with neural networks, tinker-toys, lasers, whatever. The concept of "the truth" is problematic in many ways, in that one can make statements like "This statement is not truthful", call a social media site "Truth Social", put a label like "The Truth is out There" on the intro of the X files, etc. Being able to talk about "the truth" probably erodes our ability to know the truth. Thus "the truth" is not something that comes in a can that you can paint onto a model, trying to close what looks like a little gap (in some ways it is a little gap) is like pushing a bubble around underneath a carpet.

by mfDjB 4y ago

elboru 4y ago

Same feeling, the other day I spent just too much time trying to find a chart comparing Messi against Ronaldinho. I mean two of the greatest players ever, how is it possible that I couldn’t find a good page, tons of SEO garbage pages.

graeme 4y ago
Is this a good chart? First result for “Messi vs. Ronaldinho stats” https://fbref.com/en/stathead/player_comparison.cgi?show_form=1&request=1&sum=0&comp_type=by_type&dom_lg=1&player_id1=34edcab0&player_id2=d70ce98e&player_id3=dea698d9&player_id4=e342ad68&player_id5=42fd9c7f&player_id6=69384e5d https://fbref.com/en/stathead/player_comparison.cgi?show_for... Searching without stats had a lot of other stuff, but this was near top. And searching without stats shows broader potential interests.
- elboru 4y ago
  I did check that table, the data is great, but the readability not so much (especially on mobile) the meaning of some column names was not clear (tooltip didn't work on mobile). That's why I was looking for a chart (in the graphical sense), it amazed me that I didn't find one.
  - graeme 4y ago
    Hmm. Is it possible no one has made a good one? I searched for an infographic, came up dry. Usually have no trouble in domains I know well where

ravenstine 4y ago

I know this thread is about ChatGPT, but if you're still using Google then I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine, but I've been using it for quite a while now and really enjoy it. With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them. There's also this think called "lenses" which are basically filters for specific kinds of searches. For instance, I have a "Programming" lens and a "Academic Research" lens. > Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future. What's kind of ironic about this is I think search engines may have mistakenly moved away from strong ML in the sense that you're thinking of. Yes, ML is being used for recommendations much more than ever, but in terms of heuristically finding pages with the keywords you entered, mainstream search engines have become significantly worse at it. I remember a time when The Google would find any pages with the keywords you entered. In recent years (before I stopped using it), I noticed an increasing number of times where I knew it had a page indexed but it would refuse to include it in the results for whatever reason. Either its ability to fuzzy search pages seemed diminished or it would just not match something word-for-word. I could sometimes figure this out when the page I was looking for previously accidentally came up in the results for another barely-related search, so I knew it wasn't that the search engine was culling old pages. Though I'm sure they're doing that as well where they think they can get away with it. Recommendations and curation are largely overrated, and that's where a lot of ML has been mistakenly applied. Well, I say mistakenly in the sense that it benefits the individual and society. Recommendation engines do serve the purpose of the company selling those recommendations. A true application of machine learning to answer engines is the future and will be a big problem for companies that fought the advertising wars by banking on recommendation engines. That is unless they turn their ship soon enough.

david_allison 4y ago
Kagi's 'sourced' LLM is available for free currently: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai
- duckmysick 4y ago
  This is fun. I tried this prompt: "Should I become a paying customer of Kagi?" I like how it links references to support the arguments. It even gives cons and one of the sources is a HN thread from 2016! [1] It's not there yet though, because that one was about the now defunct online store platform and payment processor. On the other hand, maybe it's my fault. I didn't specify that I meant Kagi the search engine. But it's promising. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972

mrtksn 4y ago

> Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future. Arguably, it's the ML that made Google useless for some people. Since some time, Google seems to be curating it's results to address searches in a question format. In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages but today Google seems to be trying to be an answer machine. Unfortunately it's not very good at it and it is just as inaccurate as ChatGPT.

pixl97 4y ago
>In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages I mean that died decades ago when spammers just made pages with your word repeated over and over again. Spam makes everything worse.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Completely agree. I wish Google was able to fix spam instead of trying to be something else than a search engine. The cynic in me thinks that Google is doing it because it’s more profitable. If the results are crap, maybe ads are a better content? it’s not like you are going to use Bing?
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    I don't even understand why Google doesn't allow blocking some sites in search results. Paid ads, I understand, these generate profits. Although Facebook still allow me to remove some ads that I don't want to see. But unpaid SEO rubbish, how does it benefit Google at all? If anything these parasites bogs down the quality of search results
    - _0w8t 4y ago
      It is hard to filter out SEO rubbish with a low rate of false positives. Spammers became really good at pretending to be real sites. For mail spam various trust-based solutions like server black lists, domain verification etc. were important to solve the problem. But Google has little incentives to push for a trust-based search due to their business model.

Duplo 4y ago

> "inurl:reddit.com" site:reddit.com would be slightly better :)

afarviral 4y ago
I was wondering about that. Maybe they know something we don't using inurl. To catch subdomaims maybe?

retinaros 4y ago

google is an advertisement company not a search one. and chagpt as soon as they start to be in the business of search engines will be one too. that is the fate of any tool that is free to use

xp84 4y ago
The notion that every information service should be free with ads is one of the main poisons that have made the cesspool that is the net today. Imagine how different the incentives would be if Facebook and Google just made money by making their endusers happy enough to keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee. Their customers would be the end users, instead of being the advertisers.
- Denzel 4y ago
  Reality doesn’t lend support toward your arguments. I assume you’re from a first-world country, based upon your comment. - Google’s 2022 revenue was $250B. (We’ll assume that’s all ads.) - 8B people in the world; we’ll assume only 4B people have internet access to the web. How much would Google have to charge to break even? $250B/yr / 4B people = $62.5/yr/person = $5/month/person What does the world income distribution look like? [1] 60% of the world population survives on < $10/day ($300/month) for their household (multiple people). We expect more than half the world’s population to pay more than 2% of their income for a single service? To put that in a first-world perspective, that’s $100/month for someone earning $60k; $200/month for someone earning $120k; etc. Does the average American spend that amount of money per month on a single web service? Well of course, you may say, let’s charge more for those who earn more so we can ease the pain on those who earn less! That sounds great in theory, but once again, how many people do you know dropping $200/month on a web service even if they can afford it? Back to two of your points: 1. “Imagine how different the incentives would be” - Yes, imagine, only the wealthy would have access to state-of-the-art search for the web and other services, further increasing the disparity between the two groups. Consider, maybe, that ads represent one of the greatest wealth transfers in our history. One perspective to consider is that the rich (advertisers) are subsidizing the poor (information access) via ads. That sounds like a net positive to me? 2. “Keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee” — YouTube premium exists. What do you think the uptake is on that? YouTube has provided immeasurable benefit to people across the world in the form of knowledge, resources, training, etc. Yet people would sooner reach for an ad-blocker than pay the “small monthly fee” even in nations as rich as the U.S. What causes you to believe that people will pay even more than that for Google’s other services? Disclosure: I work for Google. The opinions and data represented in this post are my own, and not representative of my employer. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/21/are-you-in-the-global-middle-class-find-out-with-our-income-calculator/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/21/are-you-in-...

radium3d 4y ago

I agree, Google has gotten worse, I find more and more often lately I do not find what I am searching for. I try to change my question/wording and it just gets worse. I think their algorithm is failing. Did they lose their way? It used to supply useful information. I think they may need to reduce their reliance on website performance. Site performance does not equate good information. They are excluding the best information just because the site loads slightly slower. Sure, it's nice having a site load fast but that's not what I'm searching for. I want the best result slow or not. As a web developer I have had to spend a great deal of time optimizing sites and clients feel it's extremely important for SEO to have the fastest Google Page Speed score possible.

xp84 4y ago
They probably didn't lose their way, so much as they slowly became less effective at combatting the exploits of black-hat SEO and the massive amount of complete garbage content farms out there, while simultaneously they have allowed the ad business to corrupt them completely, which deincentivizes them from showing good organic results because they sell more ads when it's hard to find the obvious things people want. Your hypothesis on performance is interesting! I think someone altruistic thought "if we judge sites on this metric, everyone will be forced to do better" but they failed to realize that it's a hard problem at scale to NOT be a bloated mess (especially on the frontend! 'Let's add one more UI library, it's just 12MB!')
SteveGerencser 4y ago
The whole site speed thing is purely a cost reduction on Google's part IMO. By convincing site owners that being fast is a ranking factor they can save millions in bandwidth costs as more and more people lighten their page load. I have watched many web developers absolutely lost their mind trying to squeeze fractions of a second from their load time when there are far better ways to be using their time.

Gigachad 4y ago

I’ve been going to ChatGPT first for most questions these days and then using google to verify. It’s easier to verify than find an answer from scratch. And often ChatGPT will rephrase my words to use the standard terminology for the topic which makes searching even easier. To complete the cycle, ChatGPT just needs to be hooked up to verified sources on topics so it can show me exactly where what it says is proven true.

pearl20 4y ago
Agreed. When searching at Google I can alteast decide which website I am going to trust as I can directly see the website URL and information there but with ChatGPT we don't have that advantage yet.

s3p 4y ago

What do you mean by "the delta"? I understand what the greek symbol represents in certain contexts but can we just use plain english to explain what we mean?

2342346666 4y ago

> if anything its getting worse. It's gotten a lot worst and it will probably get replaced by GPT4 or its successor.

Jakawao 4y ago

Freakonomics recently did an episode on their podcast trying to answer this very question: -Is Google Getting Worse? https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ To their credit, Google actually participated in the episode.

binkHN 4y ago

> For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam... Agreed, it's horrible and annoying. How are others doing improved searches?

t0bia_s 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539

naturedivine 4y ago

An interesting point is then that we don't need specifically Google search engine. Any search engine will do.

mizzao 4y ago

your first point (about both the crappiness of search, and Reddit) reminds me of this earlier post: https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Google is completely useless for any long tail query. All the results are so heavily optimized for broad, generic queries that you have no choice but to append Reddit.com or Stackoverflow.com to get specific, targeted answers.

tmaly 4y ago

I am finding for code searching Google does well, but I use ddg for everything else.

voytec 4y ago

> most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" "site:reddit.com" should only include hostnames ending with "reddit.com", not URLs including "reddit.com" anywhere. Not sure if this still works though - haven't used Google Search for a few years now and I'm reading (even outside HN[1]) that it's getting worse. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20230107072330/https://www.ft.com/content/228af985-7bf2-4efd-ad73-ae11d1623a58 http://web.archive.org/web/20230107072330/https://www.ft.com...

splittingTimes 4y ago
What do you use instead of Google?
- voytec 4y ago
  A search engine I'm decreasingly fond of, so won't advertise. I've tested alternatives mentioned in this thread and have no clear winner to point at.

PaulHoule 4y ago

When it comes to "ChatGPT is wrong about this one thing", a miss is as good as a mile. The book Gödel, Escher, Bach has a set of dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise over a record player that is an allegory for Gödel's theorem and other limits of computation. Hofstadter points out that it doesn't matter if you are doing computing with neural networks, tinker-toys, lasers, whatever. The concept of "the truth" is problematic in many ways, in that one can make statements like "This statement is not truthful", call a social media site "Truth Social", put a label like "The Truth is out There" on the intro of the X files, etc. Being able to talk about "the truth" probably erodes our ability to know the truth. Thus "the truth" is not something that comes in a can that you can paint onto a model, trying to close what looks like a little gap (in some ways it is a little gap) is like pushing a bubble around underneath a carpet.